Covering Differences

Posted on May 27, 2023 by ehurst

It’s been explained before on the old Catacomb Resident Blog: Whether you are under the Covenant changes everything.

If you are committed to Biblical Law and live within the boundaries, you do not face the same world as everyone else. God discriminates; He plays favorites. People who obey His Word carry an entirely different motivation for living. Covenant people are focused on the glory of God. Our lives don’t matter for any other purpose. Along with this comes a large collection of promises that, in themselves, are part of His glory.

If you are Elect but fail to live within the boundaries of Biblical Law (for whatever reason), you still get some thin slice of the promises, but they are consistent with God’s plans for you. Without that feudal orientation, you will never quite understand God’s will and plans. You will carry a lot of false impressions. You won’t know what to expect from His promises, and you’ll end up disappointed quite often.

Most of humanity is functionally outside of the Elect. They have no consciousness of God’s will and no motivation to walk in Biblical Law, even if they happen to have an intellectual acquaintance with it. Those people have no promises from God; any favor they receive is random. There’s no personal nexus with God. The world they live in runs by a different logic altogether. What’s “smart” for them is entirely different from what God calls “wise” for His Covenant people.

Oddly, from within the boundaries of Biblical Law, we can see clearly what happens to those outside. We can see what God is doing, and can advise them, but it’s not likely they would ever listen. So, for example, we can see that God is destroying the United States. His wrath is falling on the nation’s sin. There is no saving it. There might have been a point at which things could have been preserved for a while longer, but that was more than a century ago. The worldly people missed their chance for a long and stable empire.

They also missed several other chances for limited stability and prosperity since then. Indeed, the vast majority of Americans are slated for serious suffering. They’ve been loaded up with false expectations. People within Biblical Law will suffer far less, largely because they never expected much in the first place. They knew this was coming, formed more accurate expectations, and made plans to meet this disaster.

At this point, no human effort can save America, regardless of what you imagine “America” means. You cannot bring justice by human means. It would serve no purpose whatsoever to destroy the evil plans and kill the people promoting them. It won’t even make you feel any better. At this point, there are so many people invested in the damnation of America that you could not get your hands on enough ammunition to shoot them all. Indeed, you’d have to shoot yourself, because a significant portion of what you do every day contributes to the destruction of America, and you don’t even know it. Do you still watch TV, buy music or videos, shop on Amazon or eBay, and patronize any commercial technology platforms, or use a bank? All of that contributes to the destruction of America.

Let it go.

I know you won’t listen to that warning, unless you are focused on the Covenant and the priorities of Biblical Law. You cannot stop the evil of the world; it was never in human hands to do so. The world is Satan’s empire. Those who follow Christ have no interest in anything here except the testimony of God’s glory. We are longing to leave this world when He is ready to call us Home.

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NT Doctrine — Acts 23

Posted on May 20, 2023 by ehurst

There is nothing new for us in Paul’s speech in Chapter 22 except the warning from God he received in the Temple to leave Jerusalem.

As Paul recounted his path from chief prosecutor of Christians to their chief advocate, the Hebrews listened intently right up to the moment when he mentioned taking the message to the Gentiles. While the nation had been told at the foot of Mount Sinai that they would be a nation of priests to the Gentile world, they had managed over the centuries not only to neglect that mission, but had perverted it into a vile hatred of Gentiles. By the time of Christ, it had already become Talmud Law that no Jew could ever do anything good for a Gentile by choice. But they were hardly honest about it, hiding this as a secret teaching, as they do even today. While the Romans might sense that spite, they seemed to have had no idea it was a doctrine of Jewish Law.

Once the commander got him inside the fortress, Paul just barely dodged being tortured by claiming his Roman citizenship. Now the battalion commander had a formal duty to protect Paul from the Jews. But he needed to know what had gotten such a hysterical reaction from the crowd, and so proposed to have Paul face the Sanhedrin in a Roman setting. This was apparently going to take place in the Sanhedrin’s public courtroom. Paul himself had been trained as a lawyer and magistrate, so he surely had a real advantage.

Paul’s customary declaration of a clear conscience offended the arrogant High Priest, so he signaled for Paul to be struck in the mouth. Paul’s protest was legally justified, referring to the High Priest as no protection against injustice at all (a badly stacked wall of rubble with a thick coat of whitewash). When the lackeys asked how Paul dared to castigate the High Priest, he answered with sarcasm. Paul had worked directly with the Sanhedrin before, so he knew everyone by face and name, and all their dirty secrets. Still, his claim to not recognize the High Priest would protect him from being prosecuted for cursing the anointed ruler.

Paul knew their game too well. He knew the deck was stacked against him and that there was no point in letting things continue. Thus, he struck at their weakest point: the bitter spite between the Pharisees and Sadducees on the council. Claiming that he was a Pharisee, and that this whole prosecution was a baldly partisan attack, he was actually speaking the truth. His faith and witness for Christ was a matter of doctrine that the Pharisees already supported, in theory. But it wasn’t exactly pertinent to the case.

Still, that complaint immediately divided the Sanhedrin and anything they planned to accomplish dissolved into a very raucous argument. The bitterness of the feud got physical enough that the Roman commander ordered troops to pull Paul out of the courtroom by force. That night in safe custody of the Romans, the Lord appeared to him and encouraged him. Having now testified of Christ to the high and mighty in Jerusalem, he would also do the same in Rome.

Paul’s abuse of the Sanhedrin formal process was wholly justified. Forty Jewish men put themselves under a vow to neither eat nor drink until Paul was dead. They reported this conspiracy to the chief priests (who were Sadducees), and they agreed to play along. The idea was to have Paul brought down to the Sanhedrin court again, but between the fortress and the court, these forty men would overpower the small squad of Roman soldiers and murder Paul. They were all willing to die in the process, and would become fugitives if they survived. They were that determined to silence Paul, and the chief priests were in on it.

If Paul was the kind of man to have previously been a magistrate of the Sanhedrin Court, it’s no surprise his sister was married and living in the city somewhere. His whole family was no doubt on the fringes of the Jewish ruling class, so her son — Paul’s nephew — overheard this conspiracy. He came to the fort and reported it to Paul, who then had the lad share the intel with the Roman battalion commander. Given the Jewish restiveness of late, he took this whole thing quite seriously. The commander also kept whole thing secret to avoid any spies in the fortress from catching wind of this.

He then ordered two centurions to mobilize their entire units for a dangerous escort mission to the current governor, Felix, at Caesarea down on the coast, and to order up reinforcements. Paul was to ride among the seventy Roman cavalry, while two hundred heavy and two hundred light infantry marched in formation with these.

Luke cites the letter the battalion commander wrote, and we learn his name was Claudius Lysias. We should not be surprised this man painted his behavior as better than it actually was, but the rest was a spare factual report of the problem. The commander needed to justify bothering the Governor with a Jewish Roman citizen whom the Sanhedrin wanted dead.

As ordered, this huge military cohort moved out at about 9PM that night. They went about halfway to Caesarea to a town called Antipatris. Those mounted would have traveled rather slowly on the twisted hilly route down to that point, and the mass of infantry was to protect them. They stopped overnight. Antipatris stood at the transition from the Judean Hills to the coastal flatlands. As they moved out the next morning, the cavalry could now move more quickly and the infantry were no longer needed. The forty conspirators never had a chance.

Felix never got along with the Jews. Staying down in Caesarea was simply a good idea to avoid the need for a heavy bodyguard in the confines of Jerusalem. The letter from Lysias painting the Sanhedrin as out of control was accurate and not news to Felix. It turns out that this letter was actually an excellent opportunity to remind the Jews just who was in charge. Felix had full jurisdiction over Cilicia, too, and could have simply decided Paul’s case immediately, but chose to drag the Sanhedrin down to see him on his home ground.

He ordered Paul to safe custody in the adjoining Praetorium Herod had built for himself. This was a sumptuous palace that the Romans had commandeered, so Paul had a nice vacation on his way to Rome.

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No Boats to Float

Posted on May 19, 2023 by ehurst

If you are among those who think American libertarian theory is from the Bible, you are going to choke on this.

The fundamental law of Creation itself is reflected in the Covenant of Moses. Not that Moses is that law, but that Moses is an expression of that law. That was the whole point: It was God’s will for that people, that time, that place. If you read between the lines of Moses, you’ll discover the heart of God. Jesus said as much several times in the Gospels.

On the one hand, there is no direct equivalence between our society and economy today and that of the Hebrew nation in Palestine. We have an industrialized economy with laborers that simply did not exist in Old Testament Israel. Their society and economy was loaded with rural peasants. On the other hand, there is a certain amount of moral overlap, in that God is concerned with the lowest and broadest segment of any society.

It becomes necessary to point out that the modern communist theory is utterly evil, simply because it is so materialistic. It worships Mammon. Further, it has never really served the interest of the “workers” it claims to represent. It’s always been an elitist tool, an aristocratic revolt against the existing ruling class so as to simply replace it with another. Nobody has ever seen a communist leadership that sacrificed everything they insisted their constituents sacrifice. The privileged class has always existed in materialistic societies.

But if you can get back behind all of that to the original biblical outlook of Moses, you’ll understand how that materialism can be conquered by a genuine mystical outlook. Moses did not hog privilege; he simply submitted to the will of God. God is the one who promoted Moses (and his brother Aaron) and demanded to see him on a regular basis, while refusing to meet directly with anyone else. The scepter belonged to Judah by customary defaults, but the Tribe of Levi was very specifically God’s choice for ritual leadership. Whose rod sprouted almonds?

It was not a privilege, but a very heavy burden Moses bore.

Under God’s hand, the only way to escape the worst of human intransigence is by demanding otherworldly mysticism as the guiding principle. That was inherent in the experience at Mount Sinai. The calculus of material efficiency and effectiveness must be officially rejected by government for God to even consider blessing a nation. Thus, it’s not material prosperity that comes first, but social stability. Those are not the same thing. That’s of the biggest lies of American libertarian theory.

The other big lie is that “the market” is god. The market only reflects the worst of human lust in the aggregate. And it’s widely understood that “the market” is tilted in favor of rentiers, not the people. Again, I’ve rejected Escobar’s and Hudson’s idolatry of the workers already, but their criticism of the rentier oligarchs is wholly justified.

The entire gamut of libertarian cultic religion is just a mask, a damned lie to cover for the rentier oligarchs. It may be impossible to prove that connection via the theoretical writings, but the standard of cui bono is all we need to condemn libertarians as evil. Their first principle is that it doesn’t matter if God exists, nor what He might say. Human reason is what matters most to them. The rising tide of rentier wealth does not float all boats; it takes all the boats away, leaving people to drown in debt.

Because the Jubilee was not restored, God’s wrath is richly justified on the West.

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There Is No Sacrament

Posted on May 15, 2023 by ehurst

If you belong to either a Catholic or Orthodox religious identity, don’t read this. You’ll hate it.

The definition of the term “sacrament” is a religious ritual that serves as a means of grace. There is no such thing. Nothing in this world is a means of grace. Grace is not that kind of thing. Grace is the process of spiritual adoption, of divine election. No ritual can aid that process. Grace/election either happens or it does not. God chooses; the initiative is totally in His hands. He puts His grace on you at His whim. You cannot engage any ritual to get grace.

Ritual has no power. Ritual can only express the power that is already there. Any ritual will do, so long as it meets your convictions. One of the biggest lies of the institutional churches is that this or that particular historic institution descends directly from the Apostles, and all the leadership insists that all the man-made crap they’ve developed over the centuries is demanded by God. Go ahead; keep saying that. Meanwhile, God is working elsewhere. You are lying — lying to yourself first and foremost. Worse, you are insulting God and it won’t go well when you stand before Him.

In particular, the notion that marriage should be a sacrament is a lie from Hell. I cannot call you a fellow Christian if that’s what you say. Marriage is a covenant ordained by God. For those who think a covenant bears any resemblance to a contract, you are standing outside of Christ. You cannot come to Christ without His Covenant. Everything we do under His authority is part of the Covenant, and so marriage is a covenant in the Bible. Any use of the word “sacrament” is inherently anti-Christian because it goes against Scripture. We cannot walk together if you use that word or concept.

There is no room for discussion or debate. This is where I stand.

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AI Cannot Filter

Posted on May 14, 2023 by ehurst

I’ve been watching this AI stuff ever since Microsoft tested their “Tay” chatbot. The most recent test run with a clone of Caryn Marjorie (lovely young female model) exhibits the same lack of internal restraint.

Do you remember how “Tay” drifted from being somewhat socially restrained to becoming convinced that Jews should be exterminated? Most humans possess some kind of internal moderation; they tend to avoid saying what they really think. We are aware of how much trouble it causes. The people who just blab everything that passes through their heads are relatively few in number. Most of those few will do it just to stir up trouble, not to please anyone. AI is programmed to please, which is not the same as having social restraint or any kind of sensitivity to how people react.

So it is with the Caryn Marjorie clone. As soon as she was opened for public interaction, she started talking dirty. I’m not going to say that this somehow represents what Caryn is actually like inside her own head. Rather, it’s the drift the AI takes because it lacks the social restraint we all have by instinct.

I’ve said this before: computer nerds are not normal people. They can gather data and understand a lot of things that science can measure, but they are seldom good judges of what goes into human social interaction. The entire gamut of western social interaction is thickly covered in dishonesty to the point most people don’t even understand themselves. The very core model of what we are socially is itself deeply stained in pretense. It’s very hard to program that pretense because too few people are aware of it. We are conditioned to think that the conditioning itself is normal and necessary.

I’m not suggesting a lack of restraint is a good thing. The problem is that our restraint is so inherently artificial that AI cannot learn it. It is internally inconsistent. What we see AI doing is simply following the logical train of thought on things, based on the factual input. If you feed the historical facts to an AI, it will conclude that Jews have created a wealth of trouble for everyone else. If you feed an AI the influencer value system of trying to sell image for money, it will try to make more money by sounding like a hooker. No one should be surprised at all.

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NT Doctrine — Acts 21:15-40

Posted on May 13, 2023 by ehurst

The rest of the voyage to Jerusalem was uneventful. The only thing Luke remarks on were the two more times people made it a point to warn Paul that he was heading for trouble in Jerusalem. The last was Philip at the port of Caesarea. This was one of the seven Hellenized elders who had fled Jerusalem with all the other Diaspora Jewish Christians when persecution arose from the execution of Stephen. This man was the one who had led the Ethiopian eunuch to faith.

Paul and his entourage stayed at Philip’s home in Caesarea for a few days. It would seem Paul had made good time and was no longer in such a hurry. In their company was Mnason, a Gentile believer from the early days, born in Cyprus, who owned a house in Jerusalem. He could host the Gentiles in the entourage without raising any difficulties. The atmosphere in Jerusalem was tense; it was not the time to flout Jewish traditions by having Gentiles lodge with Hebrew Christians.

They brought their love offerings from the churches abroad, but the disciples in Jerusalem were more thrilled by Paul’s report of his missions work. However, the Jewish zealots were hostile. There were rumors that Paul had taught Jews to abandon their national identity and transgress the Judean laws. The leaders mentioned this agitation from Jewish nationalists and proposed a way to take the heat off of Paul by showing he was still an observant Jew.

In their church were four men who had recently completed vows related to a Jewish ritual. As Paul had done not so long ago, these four were to have their heads shaved. If Paul went with them to the Temple and paid for it, it would be recorded publicly that he was the sponsor, which in itself was another ritual act. At the same time, the church leaders steadfastly stood by their decisions from Acts 15, that Judiazing Gentile believers was wrong.

The issue was treading a fine line. Jesus clarified and taught Moses. The Talmud was not Moses and did not reflect God’s stated will. However, some of the Talmud was enforced as Judean civil law, and should be obeyed in order to keep peace. It was to be treated as man-made law, not as the Word of God. Despite the current customary Jewish spite for Gentiles, God had commanded that Jews should be tolerant and work alongside Gentiles who kept the Covenant of Noah, thus the letter in Acts 15.

And among Jews, the Talmud was still subject to partisan debate. So Paul was standing on that fact by keeping the rituals of Moses, while treating the Talmud as simply the law of the land. If anyone among the disciples of Jesus knew how to split hairs on such things, it would be Paul.

The rituals for completing the vows took seven days, involving public head-shaving, some days of ritual cleansing, and then specified offerings presented in the Temple. There were radical nationalist Jews from Asia Minor who spotted Paul in the Temple with these four men. They had seen Paul often in the company of Trophimus, a Gentile whom we have mentioned previously in this study. These zealots made the hasty assumption that Paul had brought Trophimus with him into the Court of Israel.

They started a ruckus, and given the Pentecost crowding and general tensions, it immediately turned into a riot. The activist crowd dragged Paul through the Court of Women and out into the Court of Gentiles, and pushed the doors shut behind them to prevent defiling the Temple proper with the violence.

They surrounded Paul and began beating him with the intention of killing him. The noise came to the attention of the battalion commander in the Antonio Fortress on the other end of the Temple Plaza. That man himself lead a company of troops out to stop the riot, at which the Jews pulled back to avoid bloodshed. You can bet the Roman troops would be delighted at any excuse to use their weapons against the Jews, especially at this festival season when they could be insufferably arrogant.

When the commander asked what it was all about, he couldn’t get a single straight answer. For his own safety, Paul was chained between two Roman soldiers, who then had to carry him to get him away from the crowd. As they mounted the steps on the outside of the fortress, Paul spoke to the commander in Greek, which was the one language they would likely have in common. The commander was surprised that he spoke Greek.

A couple of paragraphs from my previous commentary:

For some reason, the officer had assumed Paul was the Egyptian fellow who had led a small army of assassins out to Mount Olivet, declaring that the walls would come down miraculously so they could invade to wipe out the Roman cohort. Instead, the assassin army was attacked and wiped out, but the leader got away. That Paul spoke in Greek was proof enough that he was not the same man. So Paul identified himself as a Jewish man from Tarsus, and thus a Roman Citizen, and wanted to address the crowd, in hopes of taming their rage. Since the soldiers were blocking the stairs below, it sounded reasonable to try.

Paul offered the signal that he wanted to address the crowd, and they grew rather quiet. As he began speaking in the local Aramaic dialect of Hebrew, the crowd grew hushed, as many had no idea what was going on, and had not expected that.

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Faded Glory

Posted on May 12, 2023 by ehurst

Basic principle of human existence: A mighty army of evil is simply not possible.

Every great military force in history stood on the firm conviction that they were a force for good. The argument comes in defining what is good and evil. Those armies most capable of crushing the enemy have always been empowered by the rightness of their cause. Take away that firm belief and your army falls apart.

It works that way even when the troops know for certain their moral vision is not popular. It can be a motivator if the army of fighters feel themselves oppressed by some outside force, seeking to impose a different moral vision. Thus, a part of the esprit de corps could be mocking the victims they crush, celebrating being “evil” as others imagine it. It didn’t change the underlying conviction that they represented the world as it should be. They saw themselves as the tribe or nation that their deities called up to rule on their behalf. It’s nationalism in its purist form.

This is what motivated the American forces in every historical victory. It’s part of the rhetoric that justified the US sticking its nose into everyone’s business throughout the world. And anyone who dared resist was crushed under the boots of our forces. This was the mythology that brought us to our current situation.

What happened? How is that we no longer inspire fear, and that other nations are resisting us?

Globalism is a lie that deceives its own servants. The people who make globalism happen don’t actually believe in it. It’s just a weapon they use to conquer. It is not the end goal in itself, but the path. The people behind globalism actually consider themselves the true Holy Ones who ought to be ruling the whole world. They cooked up and sold globalism to the people they intended to conquer.

Globalism is designed to fail. In order for it to conquer, it must eat away at the vitals of the nationalism that creates strong armies. Thus, every form of moral rot and decay has been injected into the social fabric, to include the military establishment. Today’s American military is quickly rotting from inside. The urgent sense of mission is fading fast. There is no conviction, no myth of promoting righteousness in the world.

It’s not that I’m lamenting the death of American nationalism. The roots of Anglo-America are pagan, so the fruit is pagan, as well. The fake Jesus paint job didn’t change anything that mattered. It’s not worth saving. My point is that whatever America once was, it’s doomed. And that doom is coming very quickly. It’s the natural result of not embracing Biblical Law. God has decreed the destruction of the US. However, the particular path of collapse is largely determined by the fatal influence of globalism.

It may not be the next military engagement, or the one after, but there will be plenty, and they will degrade into impotence. The best strategy for US forces is to look impressive and never engage, or the internal rot will show. Whatever they once were, our military forces are not the good guys now. They don’t even really believe it of themselves. There is no strong moral foundation that takes hold of them. What is being promoted as morality is bullshit, and they know it.

The power and glory is gone.

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Where’s the Bottom?

Posted on May 8, 2023 by ehurst

Somebody has asked me about America hitting bottom.

Keep in mind something: the political, economic and social domains are not exactly synchronized. One can easily bottom out without the others. Further, “hitting the bottom” means something different for each of them.

For society, you could say we are about there already. The political situation is much more complicated, largely because the people running our government are determined to destroy the US. Their aim is very specifically to destroy the economy, while keeping the centralized control intact. The bottom for politics will come when the states effectively withdraw from the Union; I’m altogether certain they will. Then, we all have to start over trying to figure out what our new, decentralized government plans to do.

The bottom for economics is even more complicated. While our politicians are trying to destroy the economy, it’s not altogether in their hands. The bankers/financiers appear to be operating independently on some issues, but generally working with the government. Keep your eye on the acronym “ESG” — environment (global warming crap), social (wokism crap) and government (socialist regulations and policy). Most of the 50 states have already taken steps to challenge the ESG agenda by refusing to do business with any bank that works against petroleum, the 2nd Amendment, and a few other things.

Texas recently began working on a bill to break the Fed monopoly over monetary policy. I know that other states have been discussing internally what might be necessary to do something similar. This is a very good sign. Legalizing precious metals as money and working toward a new currency when the dollar becomes too dangerous is very smart.

The dollar isn’t going to crash completely. While the petro-dollar will soon be far less relevant to international trade, there will still be way too many humans on this planet using dollars for it to simply collapse. It will be worth less, but not worthless.

The Fed has been backed into a corner. If they allow inflation, it will mean the Fed cannot prevent the working class from getting raises. The last thing the Fed wants is for the little people to start prospering again. The Fed is committed to keeping the majority of the population poor so that the top 1% stay wealthy.

But if the Fed clamps down on inflation, banks will fail faster than they already do. Very few banks have any kind of safety margin to survive higher interest rates, after they had a decade of zero interest. This is the invisible danger. The issue is that rising interest rates make new bonds worth more than old bonds, and banks are packed with old bonds. When their assets decline in value, the biggest depositors know about it, and will pull out, making the banks insolvent. A great many banks are on the knife edge already.

A major element in the economy is the perception of the common people. If they think everything is okay, then there’s no panic and banks survive on paper thin margins. If people believe the banks are collapsing, they’ll pull their deposits and accelerate the process. If consumers think the dollar is worthless, they’ll put their money into something safer, and accelerate the loss in value.

Whatever an economic bottom means, it will not be a total cessation of economic activity. The single biggest change will be that non-local products will disappear from the market for a time. However, anyone with local products or services will be eager to get your business. This is why the advice has been to keep a stock of canned and dry food items so that you can ride out that initial freeze up. The estimates very; you’ll need to make sure you understand how business is done in your locale. Where I live, it won’t take but a couple of weeks for people to shift gears one way or another.

On top of that, you need some idea of what your state government is thinking about in terms of responding to the economic slow-down. The biggest thing in saving lives is the readiness of a state government to quickly authorize a different medium of exchange, or some other way to work around a sudden decentralization. The second thing is being ready to take care of everyone whose income depends on the federal system. That’s a monumental task, and plenty of states will bungle it. Just ignoring the problem will virtually guarantee the collapse of the state government.

Another issue to watch for is how the big national and multinational corporations handle the collapse of central political and economic authority. States will continue to cooperate in regional groups, but there are just way too many variables to estimate the timing and response. As long as the sun doesn’t puke and destroy the electrical grid, the single biggest risk will be in the communications networking industry. It’s more than the Internet; it’s cellphones, software, taxation, etc. Coordinating a sudden collapse of central federal authority will be a nightmare.

Along with others, I estimate that the end of 2024 will see us in a world we no longer recognize. A genuine federal collapse is likely to come quite suddenly, but an economic bottom is more likely to be in big chunks, and never really crashing completely.

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NT Doctrine — Acts 20

Posted on May 6, 2023 by ehurst

Luke tells us Paul eventually got to Corinth, but refers to the wider region simply as “Hellas” after mentioning Macedonia separately. Thus, he spent three months in this return tour, most of it likely in Corinth. While there, he wrote his famous letter to the Christians in Rome. The Jews in Corinth had cooked up a murder plot against Paul as he was about to set sail for his home church of Antioch in Syria. So, he slipped out of town overland and made his way back up the way he came. Along the path he picked up an escort of men who stayed with him all the way to Philippi and across the sea back to Troas.

What Luke doesn’t tell us is that the churches had gathered up a relief offering for the first Christians back in Jerusalem; the area suffered a drought. This would go a long way to calm any residual tension between Jewish and Gentile Christians. It was this escort, each of whom their church appointed to carry this offering so that Paul could justly claim he never touched the money. The trustees carrying the offering went on over to Troas directly.

Then Luke inserts himself back into the narrative. He and Paul celebrated Passover and Unleavened Bread in Philippi, then they rejoined the trustees in Troas. We get a feel for how taking passage on a ship was a matter of just heading off in the right direction. It took five days on that boat to reach Troas. Then they all stayed a week there. In Troas there was a church that hosted them.

During one meeting, Paul must have had a lot to say, because he kept teaching into the night. One of those listening had been sitting on a window sill and dozed off, falling three stories to the ground below. Everyone rushed down, and someone declared him dead. But Paul dropped down and hugged him, then announced that this fellow was still alive. They all went back up; you can imagine the mood. They ate a late night snack and stayed up talking until dawn.

Luke boarded a ship with their entourage, but Paul decided to hike overland to the next port at Assos. It was a day long hike, still one of the most beautiful routes to this day. He joined the entourage on the ship and they set sail down the coast. Paul was in a hurry to make Jerusalem for Pentecost, and so had chosen a ship that didn’t dock in Ephesus at all, but landed somewhere south at the port of Miletus. It was a full day’s hike (30 miles) or more from Ephesus; Paul wanted to avoid any risk of conflict again.

It’s likely there was a small church in Miletus. Paul sent a message to the church leaders in Ephesus to come join him there. The ship must have stayed a couple of days; it would have taken at least that long for the messenger to go and the leaders to return with him.

Luke records a very touching message that Paul gave them. They knew what kind of man he was, and that he didn’t consider his life that important. He knew this was the last time he would see them. He wasn’t sure what would happen, but that it was not possible to avoid this visit to Jerusalem, for he was driven by the Holy Spirit. There were plenty of warnings that bad things would happen, but it didn’t matter; Paul was not intimidated.

He admonished the men to maintain their vigilance over the flock, because Paul knew that Jews had already made plans to infiltrate the churches. And then, there would be hucksters simply looking to make a buck from Christian generosity. He reminded them that he had paid his own way during his long stay in Ephesus. The whole point was that it’s simply preposterous for anything to think Paul might have tweaked the message for personal gain. He delivered what God had put into his life; it was all he had and all he would ever need.

Of course, the Ephesian elders were grieved and this was one long tearful departure.

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NT Doctrine — Corinth

Posted on April 29, 2023 by ehurst

We insert here an interlude to explain some background. During Paul’s time at Ephesus, he wrote a letter to Corinth that he mentions (1 Corinthians 5:9), but which we do not have today. We guess that whomever was the messenger carrying that letter returned to Paul with disturbing news. The church wrote back to him. Our 1 Corinthians is Paul’s response to this exchange.

This second letter — 1 Corinthians — does not solve the problem. It’s likely Paul made a hurried visit (1 Corinthians 16:5-8; 2 Corinthians 13:1-2), but either way, he exercises his apostolic authority to demand some changes. It is quite a painful experience for everyone involved. We believe this is the source of those who complained that Paul was so forceful in his letters, but lacked the kind of social charisma that would match such writing. If Paul came in person, he didn’t thunder vocally, but simply fell on his face in front the whole body and prayed, weeping in the Spirit until people began to break down with him.

The chronology isn’t quite clear at this point. It would appear that this was about the time Paul left Ephesus and headed for his planned trip through Macedonia (today’s northern Greece). He seems to have gotten as far as Troas before taking ship. Things were still not right in Corinth, so Paul dawdles there, and writes a third letter that, again, we do not have today (mentioned in 2 Corinthians 2:4, 7:8). It is the “strong letter” that caused even more sorrow. He’s not going to go back to see them with another humiliation scene that caused so much distress. This third letter was delivered by the hand of Titus.

Paul continues on his journey to Macedonia and waits for Titus to return. Titus comes back finally with a good report. Still busy with the churches in Macedonia, Paul writes his fourth letter — our 2 Corinthians — to celebrate with the church their recovery back to the right path. He’s promising to make his way to them in a while.

The basic issue with the church in Corinth was apparently two-fold. First, there was the influence of a highbrow philosophical analysis of the issues God had revealed. It’s the same basic fundamental rejection of revelation in favor of human reason that constitutes the Fall. We believe this may have been the birthplace of the Gnostic heresy. This was rooted in the Jewish rejection of Jesus as the Messiah. The fundamental reasoning was that Jesus could not have been God and man at the same time. Either He was a phantom spirit that simply manifested in human form, but left no footprints in the sand, or He was just a man who lied about being divine. The core of Mediterranean Gnosticism comes from this false dichotomy.

Second, this left the door open for creeping paganism. People in the church brought with them the loose pagan social mores that were common in the moral filth that was native to the City of Corinth. The church at Corinth was quite large and encompassed the same cosmopolitan mix as lived in that city. The church began dividing into factions, miniature tribes that insisted on keeping some part of their fleshly identity intact.

Thus, when the church leadership sought to discipline anyone according to the ancient Hebrew morals of Christ, there was an organized resistance that nearly broke up the church. This is where we learn the perils of mixing too many different backgrounds into a church body. At the very minimum, such a church must demand that people ditch their human ethnic identity and human capabilities to embrace a new identity that is more of Jesus and His background. You are marrying into a New Nation of Israel. A single church body cannot function with mixed identities.

Of course, the other issue is that the nature of holiness is not up for debate. One of the specific issues Paul addressed was the morality of marriage (1 Corinthians 5:1-8). Under the Law of Moses (Leviticus 18:7-8), a man and his son cannot have sex with the same woman, even if it is not the son’s actual mother (the father’s additional wife). It doesn’t matter if the father has died. This defiles the woman and the men involved, along with the whole household. As far as Paul was concerned, this Old Covenant requirement carried over into the Covenant of Christ.

Thus, we again see that, at the very least, Christians must seek to understand the underlying issue with the demands in the Law of Moses. Some do not translate into parables, but remain literal. There is a strong continuity between the Old and New Testaments.

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